Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and GNF Gallery

“There are uncertains beings, corals for example, that the three categories fight over. They are animal, mineral, and recently classified as vegetal also. Maybe this is the real moment when life in obscurity awakens from the slumber of stones, without yet detaching from this raw starting point, as if to warn us, us so proud and so highly established, of this ternary kinship, of the right of the humble mineral to grow and animates itself, and of the deep aspiration that is within Nature”.
-Jules Michelet, in “The Sea”

The exhibition Hypokeimenon, en Dessous du Sang, presents materials and objects as articulations and appendages of the space that they inhabit. The sculptures, as in the castle of the Beast in Jean Cocteau’s film, accompany and oversee the wandering of the viewers.They contains ideological substances, and communicate between themselves. The works support and decorate the internal structure of the building as frieze, caryatid, stalactite; their ‘interchangeability’ points at the tenuous architecture of an identity,constructed by the desire that birthed it, forever in a state of restructuring: communicating vessels, pouring into one another.

Blood is the starting point; bile; “foutre”.The objects, like ghouls, feed off the looks that are given to them, it is the sculptural equivalent of a blood transfusion in a vampire film, sometime curse, sometime corporeal jouissance, but always a void awaiting to be filled. In a similar way to “Genius Loci”, they are spirits of the given space, here a traditional Belgian townhouse, a family space. They become expressions of lust, desire, belief.